The 16 Principles of Urban Design and the reconstruction of the cities reconstruction in the German Democratic Republic

This paper deals with the first stage of reconstruction in the German Democratic Republic and it means to clarify premises and evolution of the city project starting from “The 16 Principles of Urban Design” (1950). The choices made in the difficult socio-economical context of the time are outlined considering the reconstruction and the evolution of the urban project in the case study of city Dresden. The subject of this work is the first stage of reconstruction in the German Democratic Republic (DDR); its aim is to clarify premises and evolution of the city project just after the end of World War II. In a specific and complex socio-economic context, it’s significant to discuss the choices made by the German pro-Soviet Intelligentsia which led to the arrangement of a partly unprecedented urban landscape. In view of the destruction of the main part of the cities and of the subsequent erasure of the historic and architectonic heritage on which a collective memory is founded, the city project worked out by the Deutsche Bauakademie appears the result of theories based on functional aspects and on the need of reaching high technical standards in the production of huge amounts of building components. The musings on the idea and the shape of the urban space seem to result from the definition of a strongly ideological project rule, influenced by an analytical rationalism which risked to run into a talentless architecture. That, nonetheless, seemed more correct than the flutter of socialist realism [Hain 2004, 29]. The situation in post-war DDR was dire. Destroyed cities covered almost all the inhabited land in every part of the country. It is estimated that the sum of debris caused the bombing that took place until the end of 1945 amounted to hundreds of millions of cubic metres. There were 40 cubic metres of debris for inhabitant in Dresden, 70 in Frankfurt am Main, 21 in Berlin. The reconstruction was fast: projects and planning included a great increase in the number of residential units, which were to be built also in new satellite districts by the end of the ‘80s. Between 1958 and 1990 2,2 millions of new houses were built. Of these, more than 1,7 millions were made according to mass produced building methods. Even today there are 1.140.000 houses built with prefabricated elements in the Großsiedlungen, 600.000 in small-sized Siedlungen [Rietdorf 2001]. The housing conditions of 7 millions Western German citizens, almost 45% of the whole DDR population, improved. In 40 years, from 1950 to the end of the ‘80s, the number of inhabitants was steady, money circulation increased five-fold and savings seventy-fold. This brief summary is the premise to the description of vast city parts that even today show uniform features both formally and functionally. The common ground of all reconstructions is a clear definition of limits in relation to the background with a strictly ruled design of infrastructure, of green areas and of open spaces.